[thelist] Using CSS or table kludges -- there actually ARE criteria, AND formal decision-making process!

Techwatcher techwatcher at accesswriters.com
Thu May 23 07:11:08 CDT 2002


Contributing my $.02:

>     Well in my opinion, you should not be using table for anything other than a
>    small matrix of information.
>    Tables where never intended to be used for laying out the entire page. I say
>     do the decent thing - separate your
>     content from layout and use CSS and XHTML 1.0. Don't worry about lowly NE
>     4.x, simply so  a sniffer script and
>     remove the css from the pages that get passed to them .
>     For more details see :- http://www.alistapart.com
>     <http://www.alistapart.com>;  - loads of great articles about css / xhtml /
>     validation / fly fishing...

The Web is a document; as a documentation specialist (the level above tech writers, who don't
normally do this), this is how I would decide what to use:
In determining how to present information (as in documentation), consider AUDIENCE and
PURPOSE, also corporate culture.
Your audience always has certain tools and abilities (for example, printers and reading) and lacks others
(perhaps browsers on every desktop and programming). Thus, you would not use an online documentation
system for an audience without access to the tool or skill they'd need -- unless corporate culture was such
that support for those tools and skills would be forthcoming from top-level management, which would ensure
everyone gets the resources and training necessary.
Now, in your case, does your audience have the newer browsers, competent to render HTML decently if it
relies on CSS? Or is your audience largely stuck with old browsers?
Your PURPOSE also matters -- if you want to offer blocks of text for users to read, you NEED those large
margins and simple layout tools, for an audience with old browsers (the table kludge). If it's a table of parts
listings and prices, who cares? It doesn't have to look beautiful (or even be particularly legible) -- just
lay it out so it's easily navigable.
Remember, as you use this, that (in this "real world") government agencies, private (charitable) non-profit
institutions, and most educational institutions below college level (because colleges mostly require students
to bring their own laptops these days!) have OLD PC's and OLD browsers, and usually in insufficient numbers
at that.

Btw, documenters can also tell you how to organize information, and the criteria for that decision. But no one asks!

Cheers --
Carol Stein
techwatcher at accesswriters.com

P.S. For Burhan Khalid... I don't know
     how young the person is that you were referring to, but I think that it is
     not fair of you to bring up age as a prerequisite ...
NOT prerequisite, just in my experience, younger folks, while in some ways, very able technically, don't have
the expectations I had while I developed (or even just tested, documented/reported bugs to programmers) software.
They seem to expect lots of things to fail, and just leave them!

It surprises me that you say that there were
     "no official Quality Control departments". Since it would make more to sense
     to have stringent quality control in those days. Considering that companies
     (or universities) that had computer resources (be it mainframe or
     workstations), usually charged by CPU time. So, unless you had lots of money
     to burn, you made sure that the job you were about to submit was devoid of
     errors. Most jobs, if my memory serves me correctly, were sumitted on punch
     cards, and it was a pain to go back and have to recode everything once you
     found an error.
Accurate memory: I was working for IBM at summer job, in "Advanced Optics Research Dept" in Kingston Lab
(then), and we used punched cards, and errors were a pain. And there was certainly no formal QC area -- but one
of my first jobs was to go through code already existing and working and locate "fossils," and report them to the
head of the area. He (brilliant man, forgotten his name now) would quickly look, say "yes, remove it" or "ah, but
you missed this call to this subroutine which uses it in some mysterious way..." Our code worked, because we
took testing seriously; formal QC not needed.

> This is not fair competition; this is bald-faced
     app-war-by-having-more-capital-to-pay-lawyers.
     >

     Don't know the specifics here, but if what you say is right (and not media
     hype), then I totally agree.
I got this straight from the head of the NY XyWrite Users' Group, when I asked privately why the newest (little adopted!)
release didn't include the auto-replace "spelling" feature. So far as I know, no media ever mentioned it, let alone hyped
it. Fortunately, when XyWrite (essentially run by very bright programmer types) was bought by another company
(The Tech. Grp.) with more business sophistication, they laughed at the lawyer argument and restored the feature,
so users went back to upgrading their software.

After all, if I deleted a file, I should have
     been able to restore it from backup.
I agree absolutely -- I should have had a backup. But I couldn't. See, the file was huge, and I was running a company
on a shoestring, so our main computer was a laptop and its hard drive was only a gig. In fact, my reason for trying to
start a new mail folder in the first place was so that I could offload the huge file somehow, and process all its contents
individually. I only realized very late in the game that each message (at that time, in Outlook Express) was only findable
by that one program, that messages had been turned into non-ASCII and mashed into the other messages in a
proprietary fashion, and I would have to pull them up, copy them, and convert them one by one. Ugh. I should have tested
earlier, but Outlook had tools to search and find a message based on text, so I had never had reason before to pull out
one using another program. It seemed good to have all the message in one file so I could search more quickly...

One of the strange things that happened with Microsoft was the computing
     became a household name. I don't know how accurate my dates are, but before
     Windows first came out, I think there was the Apple I (or was it IIe). Of
     course, DOS was around, and computers were very expensive.
You're close -- many of us were using TRS-80 Model I (in small businesses and at home as well -- although the Epson
dot-matrix printer was $1000 then, so pretty much only companies had them. Radio Shack/Tandy made some dumb
decisions that kept them from becoming a household name. Such as refusing to sell the extremely useful software
(VisiCalc, LazyWriter) you could therefore only get from 3rd party vendors! I think actually the Apple debuted after
the PC, but I could be mistaken.

Btw, MSft didn't buy the OS from IBM; they got a contract with IBM to supply one, and turned right around and bought
it outright from the CP/M author (no licensing; he also was a programmer with little business sense). A few modifications, and
wow -- instant millions. In this culture, that makes BG look brilliant, but in IMO, it makes him look like a greedy man without
integrity.

Cheers...

Cheers



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